A drag queen Christmas tour has become an annual holiday tradition in Florida – and in recent years, so has the ensuing backlash.
Now in its 11th year, A Drag Queen Christmas, featuring performers from RuPaul’s Drag Race, will stop in the Florida Panhandle city of Pensacola on Tuesday night, despite state officials’ best efforts to cancel the show for what they claim is an “anti-Christian” performance at a city-owned theater.
The state attorney general has spent nearly two months lobbying Pensacola officials to cancel the show, to no avail. Instead, the 1,600-capacity tour stop is sold out.
“We can’t thank Pensacola enough for showing out and showing up. We’ll see you on December 23!” tour host Nina West said in a video posted to social media on Sunday.
Queens have continued performing across Florida, despite an anti-drag law that had been held up in court for years until last week, compounded by other anti-LGBTQ+ laws and attacks in the state. Challenges like these create a general sense of unity in the scene, said Orlando drag organizer Violet Maldonado, who performs under the name Kissa Death.
“I don’t think the community that’s here is ever gonna go anywhere, or go quietly into the night,” Maldonado said.
Florida’s history of LGBTQ+ acceptance and attacks
Florida has a long legacy of serving as home to LGBTQ+ communities, including in Pensacola. Local drag queen Edie Yacht pointed out that Pensacola’s LGBTQ+ history goes back to the 1950s with the launch of the Emma Jones Society, which for nearly 20 years hosted the nation’s biggest LGBTQ+ gathering at the city’s beaches. But in the last five years, under Governor Ron DeSantis, a wash of anti-queer and anti-trans animus snowballed into a nationwide “drag panic”.
Florida was one of several states that introduced 510 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in 2023, as tracked by the American Civil Liberties Union. In Florida, a number of the laws passed hyperfocused on “protecting” young people from gender-affirming care, trans kids in sports and preferred pronouns. Nearly 50 bills across the country focused on drag.
The anti-drag bills have dovetailed with intense attacks on drag performances, like neo-Nazi appearances outside “drag queen story hours”; a Florida neo-Nazi said anti-drag sentiment has helped raise the hate group’s numbers in 2023. In 2022, the firebombing of an Oklahoma doughnut shop occurred after it hosted drag performances, and the Club Q mass shooting in Colorado happened during a drag performance. That same year, Proud Boys gathered at the Clearwater, Florida, stop of A Drag Queen Christmas.
In 2022, the DeSantis administration investigated some of the four Drag Queen Christmas stops in the state, based on Florida’s “lewdness” laws, claiming that the venues were hosting a “sexually explicit performance marketed to children” seemingly without evidence. Earlier that year, footage of a toddler attending a Florida drag brunch had caught conservatives’ attention, according to the outlet Florida Politics.
Shortly after DeSantis signed the “Protection of Children” drag ban into law in June 2023, a judge blocked its enforcement. US district judge Gregory Presnell of the middle district of Florida wrote in his decision that the “statute is specifically designed to suppress the speech of drag queen performers”. That November, the supreme court refused to overrule the suspension of the law.
However, after a Heritage Foundation staffer claimed A Drag Queen Christmas “mocked Christ” in a blogpost this summer, controversy kicked up again. In September, local church members flooded a Pensacola city council meeting to decry the drag event as offensive to Christianity, arguing that the show’s contents aligned with the venue’s cancellation policy over content that is “injurious to public health or to the general welfare of the community”. In a 7 November letter addressed to the city council, the state AG, James Uthmeier, demanded the show be canceled. In it, Uthmeier misgendered the Seattle-based queen Bosco, a runner-up on the 2025 season of Drag Race: All-Stars, who is trans. Bosco is not scheduled to attend any of the Florida dates.
The Pensacola city council made clear several times it would not cancel the show, citing the expense of legal fees if the production company behind the tour decided to pursue litigation. But a legal update to Florida’s anti-drag bill on 15 December, putting the law into action, heightened concerns that either the city council or show organizers would back down. But that didn’t happen, and the drag community says they won’t be going anywhere any time soon.
“We’ve gotten through some crazy things. Pulse was not that long ago,” said Jenda Envy, a drag queen from Orlando. “It would have to take a lot. Ron DeSantis? Ooh girl, you’d have to show up to my house.”
The drag community refuses to stand down
All of this pushback conflicts with a clear reality – Florida is a major home to modern drag. Five of the 14 queens in the upcoming season of RuPaul’s Drag Race hail from the state. All of the Floridians I spoke to for this story emphasized that this pushback – or the conservative elected officials who net headlines for it – doesn’t represent the state’s residents, who are extremely diverse not only ideologically but in identity.
And while anti-drag critics claim the law is in protection of young people, drag performances are important to young people, too. Current touring cast member and Drag Race season 17 runner-up Jewels Sparkles, 24, recalled seeing the show as a high schooler in an interview earlier this year. “I used to live in Miami growing up, and my mom used to drive me to the theater in Fort Lauderdale where the Christmas tour would go,” Sparkles told Out South Florida. “She would wait in that parking lot while I went to go watch Shea and all the other queens. I still have pictures from the meet and greet that I would save up for months!”
Orlando drag queen Jenda Envy started drag at age 17 and graduated high school the year “Protection of Children” was signed into law. While she had a safe home environment – “I’m kind of like a Republican’s worst nightmare,” she said. Jenda Envy said her friends and classmates “who weren’t in great situations” were scared.
As a kid, Jenda Envy knew that gender was more complicated than how it was taught to her in school. “I’ve always been perceived as a little girl when I was a little boy. As a kid, I would get called ‘princess’ at Disney. I had to stop correcting people, because it happened so much,” says Envy. “As I became an adult and joined Orlando [drag scene], it made me feel like it’s OK that maybe I’m not like everyone else. Maybe there’s a bunch of other people who are not like everyone else, either. Maybe no one is really like everyone else.
“Having a support system, and not only that, but that mixed with creative expression and hard work and ambition, is what I think is so beautiful about drag,” she continued.
Yacht said queens were part of the fabric of the larger Pensacola community. Recently, a drag show served as a Toys for Tots drive; attenders had to bring a toy to get in the door. “I love doing benefit shows and helping people,” she said. “If your chihuahua has cataracts and you need somebody to come out and twirl for a few dollars to raise some money to get them their surgery, I’m all for that.”
Yacht said performers may have to continue making adjustments with the law back in play, but that’s not going to stop her from performing. “If we have to go back to the 1920s speakeasy way – but drag-focused – you will catch me in those bars performing,” said Yacht.
Though important, the drag community isn’t just all art and fun, queens say. It’s also a lifeline for community members who, like the art form itself, are being condemned and vilified in public, including by those in positions of power. When Maldonado lost her day job in part over her work as a drag queen, she said organizing an Orlando alternate drag event, called the Gala of Ghouls, kept her in touch with community, who then helped her rebuild her life. Of the nine shows she’s hosted this year in Orlando, nearly all have sold out, and every event has had at least 250 attenders.
Fans have been at the heart of the pushback, too, by continuously showing up to what can sometimes be heavily protested or policed performances. Pensacola resident Carson Wilber launched a GoFundMe to cover the estimated amount the city of Pensacola funded for the event through venue fees: $1,363. As of writing, the fundraiser has received more than double that number. “It has nothing to do with taxpayer funds, the law or with safety or protecting children,” Wilber said of any pushback against the show. “For many of the [critics], it’s an abstract moral truth that they want to impose on the rest of us. And I think that’s wrong.”
Qommittee, a national coalition of drag performers, advocates and allies, said the best thing people can do to push back against drag bans is to keep going to drag shows. “Show up, support performers, and tip generously,” the group said in a press release. “If you’re a performer, don’t back down – keep performing, know your rights, and protect yourself. The goal of this intimidation campaign is to make us disappear. We won’t give [Florida AG Uthmeier] what he wants. Silence is submission.”
For those told they don’t have the right to exist, or that to be themselves is to risk shame, violence, or erasure, drag remains a needed community gathering place, a respite from a hostile world and a reminder that queer and trans people keep each other safe (while looking great, too).
“Drag is at the center of our community,” said Yacht. “We’re like the royalty: we’re the ones who are seen first, heard first, and we speak up for our community. They’re attacking the head of the community, so to say, and once we’re gone and silenced, what’s next? I feel like Pensacola is the spark to the fire they’re trying to start.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
